"My wife was with her relatives in the German Democratic Republic and they were returning on August 10, 1968. They came back all terrified, because they saw many German tanks on the border. They asked someone there about it, and he said: ´Well, that’s kind of ... ´ I'm not sure if you know it, but a military exercise was really held there at that time. There was a military exercise for the Warsaw Pact armies. There were Rumanians, Russians, Poles, East Germans, and who else was there? Hungarians. And over there, on the western border of the eastern bloc there was shooting and they played soldiers there. But the exercise was now ending, they didn’t estimate the date correctly and finished it earlier before something happened. They were already leaving, but whereas the Poles and others really left and crossed the borders back to their own countries, the Russians stayed in Slovakia."
"The holes were covered with a plank which connected them and covered the opening between the parts. The bugs lived in the space behind the planks. During the day it was fine, but when you turned off the lights at night, you could hear some rustling sound. We already knew what to do. When the rustling began, the bugs were all over the ceiling and they began falling down. Not all of them were able to hold onto the ceiling. We all got out of beds, grabbed our shirts, shoes, or whatever was at hand and started smashing the bastards on the ceiling."
"Both German and Czech were being spoken everywhere, because people who could speak German wanted to show off that they could speak it, although they didn’t have to, because the shop assistants in the shops were Czechs. But there were some bastards who wanted to show off their fluency in German, and they would start speaking German instead of Czech. Others could not oppose them, but people told each other them, and a person like that was generally disdained. After the war they were labelled as collaborationists."
Karel Malý was born in 1928 in Dvůr Králové. He joined the Scouts already before WWII. After the war he began leading Cub Scouts, and continued as a leader until the end of his life. During the war he studied at a trade academy and learned the typographer‘s trade. The fact that his father had been a legionnaire in Russia during WWI where he fought against the Bolsheviks complicated Karel‘s life during the subsequent communist era. He was drafted to the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP) where he had to work in coal mines in Kladno. His military service period was extended and he faced problems in his job as well. He has spent the rest of his life in Dvůr Králové, where he died on June 8, 2012.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
